An Explainable Machine Learning-based Network Intrusion Detection System for Enabling Generalisability in Securing IoT Networks

Machine Learning (ML)-based network intrusion detection systems bring many benefits for enhancing the security posture of an organisation. Many systems have been designed and developed in the research community, often achieving a perfect detection rate when evaluated using certain datasets. However, the high number of academic research has not translated into practical deployments. There are a number of causes behind the lack of production usage. This paper tightens the gap by evaluating the generalisability of a common feature set to different network environments and attack types. Therefore, two feature sets (NetFlow and CICFlowMeter) have been evaluated across three datasets, i.e. CSE-CIC-IDS2018, BoTIoT, and ToN-IoT. The results showed that the NetFlow feature set enhances the two ML models’ detection accuracy in detecting intrusions across different datasets. In addition, due to the complexity of the learning models, the SHAP, an explainable AI methodology, has been adopted to explain and interpret the classification decisions of two ML models. The Shapley values of the features have been analysed across multiple datasets to determine the influence contributed by each feature towards the final ML prediction.